This blog is about my experiences with hypothyroidism and to swap notes with other people. I was diagnosed in 2009 and am still not entirely well, though I’m much better now than I was. I set up a thyroid patients' support group in London in 2010 and we continue to meet regularly and welcome new members. There's lots of info on the net aimed at thyroid patients, much of it contradictory and confusing. My aim is to provide a more balanced perspective and information from credible sources.

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Saturday, 3 November 2012

I wish I knew about this, but I don't.... Day 3 #nhbpm

Woo hoo, look at me, posting 3 days in a row for @wegohealth's health blog post month. No comments on any of the articles yet though, which is strange as I can see people are visiting the site. Anyway.....

Today's prompt is: "I don't know about this, but I'd like to...."

I don't know about biology, I was so uninterested in the subject at school, can you believe, I didn't get it's relevance to me at all! How can teaching be so bad and/or curricula so ill thought through that a reasonably bright young biological being, who was let's face it as self obsessed as the next teenage girl, could go to school every day for how ever many years it was and just not clock that biology had anything to do with me?

In the UK we get to choose what subjects we will study after age 14. Up until then you just study what they tell you and in the first two years of secondary education you do all the sciences. At least that's how it worked in my school days, a zillion light years ago. I think it's still about the same.

My Mother died when I was five, not sure if I've told you that before. That has been a major thing in my life, as you can imagine. Being without a mother growing up was tough as hell. My Dad brought me up on his own. Many traumas: he bought me terrible nylon stripey jumpers to wear and wouldn't sew my Brownie badges on my uniform because he thought cowgum glue was perfectly adequate and was completely disinterested and un-supportive of my regular lobbying to go to dancing classes or majorettes because he knew that meant that he'd then have to do tricky things with sequins and ribbons on shoes for end of year shows and he was having none of it. I got my own back by becoming a punk at the earliest opportunity. I digress, that's all another story.

The reason I mention it in this post, is that I think it's pretty weird, given that my mum had some mystery illness and died so young, that I never had the urge to find out about what makes the human body tick. It's like I had some mental block.

The main reason I refused point blank to consider studying biology is because I knew that if I did they would make me dissect a bulls eye and a dead rat. Everybody in the school knew that was what biology classes entailed. No way. It was never going to happen.

I can't believe it wasn't possible to make the subject more appealing and relevant to me and all the other kids who dropped it at the first opportunity. I feel let down now. So many of my hours and days years at school were spent bored out of my tiny mind. And now I'm so filled with curiosity and awareness of my ignorance. I wish I knew more about how my body works.

I've learned a lot about thyroid disease since my diagnosis three years ago. But there is still lots that I don't know and I learn new stuff all the time. The human body and medicine is this vast and fascinating subject. Even doctors don't know it all, far from it. And I've come to realise that my symptoms have sometimes been alleviated by things other than thyroid hormone treatments. That my condition isn't as simple as being just down to one thing with one simple cure (for a long time I hung my hopes on T3 treatment because so many thyroid patient sites are so focused on that and I kind of caught the bug, but now I realise, that for me, T3 appeared to help a bit for a while but ultimately other things have had a bigger impact on my improving health.

The doctor at the fatigue clinic showed me a fascinating diagram of how all the different systems in the body are interlinked and affect each other. I got the principle but I wish I understood the detail more. I particularly wish I understood how things like nutrients and trace elements work and I wish I could identify a magic supplement I could take that would bounce my health back to being fully functioning. Ha ha, if only it was that simple.

Maybe one day I'll know all the answers..... I'll keep looking for them anyway. I know more than I used to at least, that's a start. Learning all the time.

With smiles. Thanks for reading. Feel free to share any thoughts below.

4 comments:

The thing that's great about being a "grownup" is that you can then learn about anything you find interesting. What about sitting in on an intro biology class at a local college? Or taking an online class? I love learning new stuff that I get to choose as an adult. I took mostly science classes throughout college and they were really really hard for me. I'm now catching up on all the humanities/literature I was deprived of. ;-) Good for you for wanting to know more about your body! And YAY #NHBPM!

ooh biology was one of my fav subjects in highschool. it definitely all depends on the teacher though, when I took a class in college, it was so dumbed down and boring...if that had been my first biology class, i'd have hated it. hope you get to learn what you want!

thanks for commenting Merri, I am learning more about biology from the events I'm now organising for the British Thyroid Foundation group in London.

We did one on Saturday and had an endocrinologist talking about thyroid and pregnancy, just fascinating!

A volunteer science writer has offered to write it up and I'm hoping to share her report on here shortly. I'm learning all the time, a class sounds like it could be really interesting, if I can find the right one as you say!